December 25, 2010 - Some 50% of the country’s cafés and discotheques allow smoking, despite the ban for all except small, one-man operated bars, according to new figures from the food and safety inspectorate.

According to the Volkskrant (a national daily Dutch morning newspaper), the new government says around half of the country’s bars are smaller than 70 m2, meaning they are exempt from the ban, provided they do not employ staff. However, the Dutch catering association says the figure is closer to 25%.Not only is there confusion about the size of bars, but bigger cafe owners say they are faced with unfair competition.

‘Since the government said it would soften the ban, the whole sector has been discussing it,’ Ben Francooy, chairman of catering workers’ union FNV Horecabond told the paper. ‘If you are going to make [the ban] more flexible, you open the door to fiddling the figures.’ In some places, cafe owners have an alarm light to alert each other if inspectors are spotted, Francooy said.

1 comments:

Now tell us, if smoking bans were as popular and were bringing in as much new business as the anti-smokers try to convince us, would anyone want to flout smoking bans?

Could it possibly be that it is because smoking bans are only popular with a very small minority of anti-smokers who want the whole world to cater to their olfactory preferences and could care less how many businesses and people they hurt in the process?